June 2022: The Illicit Happiness of Others (Manu Joseph)

``On a street where every boy knows that his future rests on a single test with multiple-choice questions, it is appropriate that the four identical buildings here are named A, B, C and D."

``Sai stands in his spineless way, young but antiquated, studious but not clever, a thick steel watch on his wrist, his oiled black hair combed in the good-boy hairstyle. He looks like the past of an old man."

``Sai will learn to be happy again one day, he will even imagine that he is not worthless. He does not know it yet but the simple fact is that he will make it. Ambition is the capacity for unhappiness and Sai has a lot of that to pull through."

``Strong people write bad stories."

``What’s real about a name?"

``‘So all that we think is good,’ Beta says, ‘love and art and enlightenment, and all that we think is the pursuit of truth is actually a form of evil."

``He said every delusion has an objective, and the objective of a delusion is not merely to colonize one brain but to transmit itself to as many brains as possible....any philosophy that can be transmitted to another person is a delusion. If two people believe in the same idea of truth, it is a delusion."

``He stares at the open textbook for hours and is distracted by the pain of the parallelogram, which is slanted for ever. His nails scratch the page to straighten its tired limbs. It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun."